Crude oil is getting scarce. This is why researchers are seeking to substitute petroleum-based products - like plastics - with sustainable raw materials. Waste wood, divided into lignin and cellulose, could serve as a raw ...

Most industrial manufacturing processes involve the use of many different reagents across multiple reactors—an approach that is costly, laborious, time-consuming and environmentally unfriendly. 'One-pot' processes, in contrast, ...

(Phys.org)—Call them cloud wannabes. Scientists at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory found that when the sky is described as partly cloudy, particles near those clouds swell larger with water vapor. The larger particles ...

(Phys.org)—Scientists from the Florida campus of The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) have developed a new method of screening more than three million combinations of interactions between RNA and small molecules to identify ...

(Phys.org)—Using simple technology developed primarily for producing electricity from hydrogen, a team of researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, University of Massachusetts-Amherst and Gwangju Institute of ...

At a time when the value of gold has reached an all-time high, Michigan State University researchers have discovered a bacterium's ability to withstand incredible amounts of toxicity is key to creating 24-karat gold.

(Phys.org)—Scientists at The Scripps Research Institute have shown how to synthesize in the laboratory an important set of natural compounds known as terpenes. The largest class of chemicals made by living organisms, terpenes ...

(Phys.org)—A three-way collaboration between Japan-based Rohm, Aquafairy, and Kyoto University has resulted in the development of a smartphone-charging fuel cell—a compact, high output, portable hydrogen powered fuel ...

Heavy metals and other toxins frequently contaminate food and water. The culprits read like a litany of bad actors—lead, cadmium, mercury, arsenic, chromium—but their numbers run into the thousands. Microbes have long ...

Chemical compound

A chemical compound is a pure chemical substance consisting of two or more different chemical elements that can be separated into simpler substances by chemical reactions and that have a unique and defined chemical structure. Chemical compounds consist of a fixed ratio of atoms that are held together in a defined spatial arrangement by chemical bonds. Chemical compounds can be compound molecules held together by covalent bonds, salts held together by ionic bonds, metallic compounds held together by metallic bonds, or complexes held together by coordinate covalent bonds. Substances such as pure chemical elements and elemental molecules consisting of multiple atoms of a single element (such as H2, S8, etc.) are not considered chemical compounds.

Elements form compounds to become more stable. They become stable when they have the maximum number of possible electrons in their outermost energy level, which is normally two or eight valence electrons. This is the reason that noble gases do not frequently react: they already possess eight valence electrons (the exception being helium, which requires only two valence electrons to achieve stability).